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A one-eyed Liverpool boxing coach who admitted meeting Dale Cregan in a secret rendezvous was cleared of helping the cop killer lay low.

Marvin ‘Marv’ Herbert, 44, was among four people on trial accused of helping Cregan, Anthony Wilkinson and Jermaine Ward stay at large after the murder of David Short in Droylsden, Greater Manchester, in August 2012.

Cregan remained on the run until after he murdered police officers Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone a month later.

Prosecutors alleged that Herbert “joined a conspiracy that kept the three offenders at large, evading capture and arrest, despite a widespread and costly manhunt” in the wake of the Short murder.

Dale Cregan

But a jury cleared Herbert, who was born and raised in Toxteth, in a retrial at Manchester Crown Court.

Herbert – who was extradited from Estepona in southern Spain, where he helps run a boxing gym, in September 2013 – was a long-time associate of Ward who supposedly knew of Cregan.

He was accused of making the necessary arrangements for the gang to lay low at the house of Jack Willbye, 67, in Herne Bay, Kent, whose labourer son Sam, 29, spent time with Herbert in Spain.

But Herbert told the court that he met Cregan, Wilkinson and Ward in Kent in August 19, 2012, but refused to help them after being told for the first time that they were on the run for the murder of Mr Short.

In the first trial, in which a jury failed to reach a verdict, Herbert told how he had renounced his criminal lifestyle in 2008 when he was shot five times in an assassination attempt on the Costa del Sol. Like Cregan, he has only one eye.

The court was told of Herbert’s “unenviable” criminal record of 21 convictions for 76 offences, beginning when he was 13 and culminating in a five and half year spell in jail in 2003.

He admitted having a “warped moral compass” as a youth and said he turned to crime as a “means of survival”.

But he insisted he went clean after being shot five times in a daylight attack in Marbella. He was blasted in the eye, groin, leg, forehead and arm and told by doctors he may never walk again.

Herbert told jurors that he was shot by a member of a British drugs gang, whom he had loaned money to and who wrongly thought he was a police informant.

He said after coming close to death, he turned his back on crime to be there for his five children.

“At that specific moment in my life I realised that my existence had been pointless and meaningless. I decided that because I was fortunate to be kept alive, I would have to change dramatically. Not just for myself but for my kids, to guarantee that they had me in their lives for years to come.”

Herbert, Jack Willbye, of Herne Bay, Sam Willbye, of Durham and Raj Khan, 44, from Bradford were found not guilty of conspiracy to assist an offender.

Ward remained at large until August 23 and Wilkinson, September 2, with Cregan finally arrested on September 18. All were jailed over murder charges in June last year.